Meet The Family Ruling The Internet With Dinosaur Costumes

If you’ve been on the Internet much these past few months, you may have noticed an usual amount of dinosaur costumes popping up in viral videos and memes. (As Mashable phrased it, the T. rex suit is basically 2016’s horse mask.) You can thank the Clay family from New Hampshire for blessing the World Wide Web with this phenomenon.

Beth Clay and her extended fam own four dinosaur costumes, and they were the first people to film ’em getting into all sorts of shenanigans. Clay bought the first costume as a gift for her 3-year-old niece, Allie, who asked for “a best friend dinosaur” for her birthday last July.

“Allie was completely enthralled [by the costume],” Clay told MTV News over the phone. “It didn’t have a name yet, so we sat down and talked about what the name of a dinosaur should be. She [Allie] said, ’I think you should name it Pickles.’ I said Pickles is a weird name for a dinosaur, and she goes, ’Yeah, but if they had more pickles, dinosaurs wouldn’t have died.’ And I was like, OK, 3-year-old logic. I’m going with it.”

That’s how Pickles B-Rex, who now has over 26K Facebook followers, was born. The family purchased a second adult dinosaur costume in case the first one tore and named the backup Olive. And then when Clay saw that the suits were available in children’s sizes, she bought two more, which were later dubbed Gherkin and Pimento.

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The entire Clay family have tried on the suits. Beth’s brother, brother-in-law, 16-year-old Jason, and 9-year-old Natalie rotate through the two adult costumes (Pickles and Olive), while Allie and 4-year-old Sage use the smaller costumes (Gherkin and Pimento).

“As long as it’s fun and light-hearted, we’ll take it wherever it goes,” Clay said about the videos her fam’s created. “[That’s] the heartbeat of what Pickles is — never being negative, never having a fighting dinosaur.”

“Big picture, we’re looking for a way to entertain people,” Clay continued. “If nothing else, I’ve definitely given the 3-year-old a dinosaur best friend as she requested.”